DEVELOPMENT OF AIRBORNE MOVING TARGET RADAR FOR LONG-RANGE SURVEILLANCE

The U.S. Navy has used the Grumman E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, with its long-range, high-power radar since 1973 in more than 70,000 missions. The system supports carrier operations by providing surveillance and warning plus assistance in command and control. Currently, it is used to protect U.S. Naval forces, to guard the borders of the U.S. allies, and to assist in drug interdiction activities. The high altitude platform provided by the E-2C gives the radar a very long line-of-sight range but at the price of severe surface clutter. Thus, it was necessary to incorporate into the radar the feature of AMTI or Airborne Moving Target Indication, which permits detection of targets that otherwise would be obscured by ground or sea clutter. The rejection of clutter by AMTI is complicated by the fact that platform itself is moving. The 1991 Pioneer Award winners, Dickey, Labitt and Staudaher, invented and helped perfect techniques for platform motion compensation that are essential to the success of the E-2C radar as well as to other AMTI radars. During the period 1953-57, Dr. Frank Dickey and co-workers at the General Electric Electronics Laboratory, Syracuse, with sponsorship by the Wright Air Development Center, developed the technique DPCA which compensates for platform motion normal to the beam axis. In about 1957, Melvin Labitt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory developed the technique TAACCAR which compensates for platform motion along the beam axis in a coherent radar. Then in the early 1960's, Fred Staudaher was a key contributor in a team at General Electric, Utica, NY, who incorporated DPCA and TACCAR plus new computer technology into the APS-111, the forerunner or APS-120 series of radars for Navy E-2 aircraft.